The Will of the Strong
by Sanctuaria
Summary: Physical addictions are hard to break, but that's nothing compared to when the addiction is merely a symptom of something else. Alex's detox, based on flashbacks from Season 1. Rated M for events in Alex's life pre-Nikita and language. One-shot, complete.


**Disclaimer: No copyright infringement is intended, as this is a work for entertainment purposes only. I do not own Alex, Ronnie, and Nikita or the dialogue taken from the show. **

**Title:** The Will of the Strong  
**Category:** Nikita  
**Started:** 1/24/15  
**Completed:** 1/27/15  
**Summary:** Physical addictions are hard to break, but that's nothing compared to when the addiction is merely a symptom of something else. Alex's detox, based on flashbacks from Season 1. Rated M for events in Alex's life pre-Nikita and language.

* * *

**Alexandra Udinov** has been known by many names in her short life. Her full one, with her parents Nikolai and Katya back in Russia. Sasha, by the human traffickers who brought her to America to be a sex slave. And now that's she's escaped, it's just Alex. Alex, who has to reconcile both parts of her life with each other, different and convoluted though they are.

The midday sun is bright and harsh, shining down relentlessly on the hot black asphalt of the street. Rundown, foul-smelling houses line it, with yards of dirt and weeds and broken fences with peeling paint. The sidewalk has more cracks in it than smooth sections, creating the illusion that an earthquake has struck here recently.

As for here, Alex isn't exactly sure where here is. She's been moved and shunted around a lot against her will, and places have ceased to mean much to her anymore. She also doesn't care about the sun, the street, or the state of the sidewalk—all she cares about is the cash in her hand and the itching of her skin and pounding of her head. She has to get it to Ronnie, and he can make her feel better. He can make the pain go away.

She approaches the crackhouse with shaking legs, every part of her thrumming with need, with anticipation. She wants this to be over with, she wants it to be done with, she wants to be high again so she can forget everything and float away on a cloud. The human traffickers and her pimp made her an addict to keep her subservient, but the thought of breaking it has scarcely occurred to her. It's not like she can see any other life in her future than that of a junkie. And the drugs keep the pain away. She's very fond of that.

"Ronnie? Ronnie? Ronnie," she bursts into the crackhouse with cash outstretched.

"Do you have it?" he asks, eyeing her greedily. She's panting with the exertion of rushing here. "Alex, Alex, Alex," he tuts. "Always strung out, always late."

"Here you go," she says, thrusting the money towards him. He snatches it out of her hand and turns away to count it. "Where is it?" she asks when he's taking too long. "Where is it?" She looks around the crackhouse desperately, but there's none in sight.

"Where's the rest of my money?" he counters.

"I gave you a fifty!" she tells him, trying to keep the tremor out of her hands. "Stop playing, Ronnie, I just need a hit." He has it on him, what'll solve all her problems, but he's faster and stronger and trying to take it from him will do her no good. His buddies are watching them from the sidelines.

"Calling me a liar?" he demands. There's a hard sting across her face as he hits her, sending her to floor with glass shattering underneath her from the table top. Roaming, roving hands grab her while she's down, force her onto something soft and filled with the musty smell of smoke and sweat. A bed.

"Okay," Ronnie agrees, and Alex's heartbeat quickens. She just needs it, and she needs it now. "You make us feel good, we'll make you feel good." He advances on her before she can process what he's saying, the way his friends are pinning her down with feral grins, the way he's leering at her. She's seen this before, she's seen all of it, she recognizes the vileness from all the men who've just taken what they wanted from her over the years. The swagger, the lust.

For a hit, she might have done Ronnie. It is nothing she hasn't done before. Anything to stop the giant hammering at her skull, the feverish chills that tingle down her spine, the abrasive, clear thoughts that come with sobriety. But all three? Her small, weak body can't handle it. She'd run away from the sex slave life for a reason, but now she knows perhaps she'd never really escaped.

"No!" she shrieks as his friends pin her arms down to the bed. She's struggling, straining to get away, but they're too strong. Their rough nails dig into her wrists as they hold her down, bruising everything with their iron grip. If only they'd let her be high right now...if she were high, she could survive this.

"Let the girl go," says a new voice, female, barely registering to Alex over her own screams. One of Ronnie's friends lets go of her arm, pulling a gun from his waistband and pointing it at the woman. Alex is too shocked to writhe. The woman dispatches him quickly, disarming him and making the gun clatter to the floor.

"Who the hell are you?" Ronnie demands, stepping forward impulsively. "Her fairy godmother!" the woman shouts as she bashes his head against her knee. His other friend releases her arm and attacks, and Alex scrambles for the gun that's fallen on the side of her bed. Her hands find it, cool, convoluted metal, and she picks it up, pointing it at the unknown assailant and fires. The woman ducks reflexively and the bullet lodges itself into the doorframe well above her head. "It's okay, it's okay," she tells her, but the gun goes off in her hands again and the woman moves toward her and everything goes black.

* * *

The first thing she's aware of is the warmth surrounding her, the humid, muggy air that reminds her of the bowels of the slave ship. Her eyes snap open and are immediately flooded with dim orange light, unfamiliar floor, unfamiliar walls. She's up in a matter of seconds, terrified and staring around at the four walls enclosing her, trapping her in this space. Through the steam she can see a window, a sheet of semi-transparent glass, and she launches herself at it, hands smacking against it and sending fire up her arms. She scrabbles at it with her palms, trying to see outside through the foggy glass. "Help! Help!" she shrieks. She can't be locked up again, she can't be trapped like this, no, no, no...

The woman from the crackhouse approaches and Alex latches onto the sight of her like a lifeline. "Just relax, Alex. Breathe, in and out," the woman instructs, not the least bit perturbed by the situation. It's then that Alex knows this is not a friend. She's her captor.

"Let me out of here!" she screams, pounding on the glass once more. She can't keep the tremor from her voice, a tremor made by distilled fear and unwanted memories and the cruel fact that too long has passed since the drugs that help her deal have coursed through her system.

"I will, I promise," the woman says in a placating voice, stepping up to the glass calmly. Alex doesn't like the far-off connotation of 'will.' "For now just breathe."

Alex does as the woman says, panting like a dog with her fingers still pressed to the glass. She'll do whatever she says, whatever she says to get out of here. It's reminiscent of another time, another place. "Who are you?" Alex asks. "Where am I?" She can't recognize anything outside of her tiny prison.

"You're at my place; I'm a friend," the woman says infuriatingly.

"If you were a friend, then you'd—then you'd let me out of this closet," Alex pleads.

"It's not a closet, it's a portable sauna," the woman replies. Of course it's not a closet. Alex knows that. But she was in a closet once, locked there, and then and now are blending together, past and present horrors in one big pit of terror. "I built it myself. It's going to help you get clean."

No. No. Alex pounds on the glass with one hand. "Why are you doing this?" she screams.

"Let's call it a gift."

"I know how to get clean, okay? I know how to get clean," Alex babbles. "I just, I need to come down easy, okay?"

"There is no easy way down," the woman replies, almost sadly. All Alex can think about is getting out of this cage and finding something to take the edge off. To dull it all.

"I don't need a sauna!" Alex shrieks. "I need a hit!" Her throat burns at the high-pitched scream she lets out, but she doesn't care, she doesn't care, she doesn't care. She wants to jump out of her skin, her legs won't stop shaking, her head is pounding with suppressed memories, and her heart beats wildly and erratically.

"It's very rude to question a gift, you know," the woman tells her, turning away and leaning against the edge of the glass.

"Please," Alex sobs. "Please." She can't stay in here, she can't handle it, she can't, she can't, she can't. "I'm going to die in here," she whimpers, and she half hopes it's true and soon. Her forehead is pressed against the glass; she doesn't have the strength to keep it up anymore. She's on the verge of sliding downward to the floor, but an impossible hope that the woman will have mercy, that the woman will let her out keeps her on two feet.

"I know it hurts, okay?" the woman says. "Your nose won't stop running, your stomach's cramping, you feel like your head's going to fall off... Believe me, I know." The woman turns away again, not looking at her. Alex feels all that and more, like she wants to reach into her chest and claw her own heart out.

"I can only promise one thing," the woman says. "It's going to get worse, before it gets better. As long as you're here, you're safe." She starts to walk away from Alex's little window, her hope of release and mercy and life going with her.

"No!" Alex screams, pounding the glass with both fists, but the woman continues slowly walking away. "No! Fuck you! No! Fuck you, let me out!" The woman is gone, and she collapses to the ground, spent and shivering. An ache has set into every one of her muscles and her eyes are tearing up without her permission. Her breathing comes in ragged gasps, and in this claustrophobic, steamy cell she can't seem to get enough oxygen. Who is this woman to put her through this? Who is she to pull the strings like some deranged puppeteer?

Chills wrack her body as her eyes squeeze shut. She seems to vibrate with uncontrollable tremors, and Alex just wants to die. She forces herself up and to her feet, following one last shred of hope to peer desperately out the little window again. She can't do this, she can't, she can't. It hurts too much. There was nothing wrong with her life before. Nothing wrong at all. Now memories threaten to invade her mind, memories of fire and boots and gunshots and a dank cellar. Men in masks. Cages and needles, so many needles, needles she would beg, plead, grovel, pleasure—everything they ever wanted from her—for now.

She pounds the glass again, screaming and shrieking until her throat is raw. The woman doesn't reappear; there's no one here to hear her.

Alex barely makes it to the opposite corner before she's puking up this morning's breakfast, heaving until she's well past empty. She collapses on the ground once more, but the walls seem to be closing in on her and she can't stop shaking. Her heart hummingbirds in her chest, her blue eyes dilated and darting anywhere and everywhere. A wave of nausea hits her again and she's retching on her side, unable to move but unable to stop moving at the same time.

Spasms rock her body and somehow she ends up with her cheek in the pool of vomit. Alex lays there, trembling, unable and unwilling to get up, exhausted. She's exhausted but she can't fall asleep, for that would be too much good luck for her life. So instead she drifts into a half-awake, half-unconscious state, where dreams and memories of old mingle and time ceases to have meaning. She's only vaguely aware of the twisting of a key in the padlock, of the sound of a large metal door grating against its track as it opens, of the woman kneeling beside her and mopping the vomit into a bucket.

"I'm not going to baby you," the woman says, and Alex doesn't have the strength to respond. To say she doesn't want to be babied. To say she's not a child. To scream at her to leave her alone and mind her own damn business. She's vaguely aware of the woman's gentle hands grasping her head and lifting it up, wiping away the breakfast and stomach acid concoction from her cheek and then the sheen of sweat across her forehead. "But I am going to take care of you. You're strong, Alex: you _can_ get through this." The door to her prison shuts again with a clang. Alex remains lying there. Alone.

It could have been be hours or days before that door opens again and the woman kneels down beside her. "Come on, up you get," the woman says. "The worst of it is over now." Her hands hook under Alex's arms and haul her up. As soon as her feet are flat on the floor her legs begin to buckle underneath her and the woman has to catch her quickly before she lands on the ground again. Her arm snakes around Alex's shoulders, steering her toward the door. Eyes half-lidded, she stumbles forward, almost falling as she steps outside of her prison. A small cot a few feet away barely registers before she collapses on it, quivering. "Try to get some sleep," the woman tells her, pulling the covers over her. "You're safe here."

But the woman lies. Her dreams conjure up heat and blood and cages and she's not safe here at all. Not from anything she's running from.

* * *

When Alex wakes, she wakes with a pounding headache. She stays completely still at first, eyes darting around, taking in her surroundings. She's in a spacious apartment with huge windows overlooking the city. Which city, she doesn't know. Based on the light, it's either morning or evening. Behind her, pots clank on the stove. Alex clenches her jaw tightly, doing her best to appear still asleep. Footsteps approach and a dark shape appears in her peripheral vision. The woman touches her shoulder and she lunges at her, fingernails clawing.

"Whoa! Whoa!" the woman says, blocking Alex's flurry of blind attacks. She grasps the girl's wrists and wrestles them down to her chest, forcing her to stop fighting. "Hey, I didn't mean to startle you." She releases Alex's arms slowly, obviously ready for the girl to make another move. "I made breakfast." She meets Alex's frightened, angry gaze. "I'll just put it right here, all right?" The woman places the bowl on the floor at the edge of her cot. "How're you feeling?"

"Like I need a hit," she growls, sitting up. Blood rushes from her head, making her feel woozy.

"I'm sorry, Alex, but I can't let you do that. That stuff's finally out of your system. You're going to have a rough couple of weeks, but you'll be fine."

"Let me out. You can't keep me here."

"You're not going anywhere. You have nowhere to go."

"The street would be better than here," Alex spits, crossing her arms.

"Do you need anything from the store?" the woman asks. "I'm going to go pick you up some clothes and toiletries." The woman was going to...going to leave her here? In her home?

"No," Alex frowns. "No." She pulls her knees up to her chest and rests her head on them, staring into space defiantly.

"Okay," her captor says. "I'll be back soon." Alex watches as she exits the apartment, and as soon as the door closes she leaps to her feet. The sudden movement sends waves of dizziness over her, and she has to stop to recover for a moment. As soon as she's able she makes for one of the huge windows. Her fingers scrabble at the edges for some kind of locking mechanism to release, but looking down she knows it's futile—the ground is much too far below. Next she breaks for the door, twisting and tugging at the knob to no avail and she lets out a scream of frustration. Only her psychopath captor would have an apartment that can lock from the outside. Off to the side she sees the bathroom and she runs to it, splaying her fingers on the counter as she pants, hyperventilating over the sink.

She sees her reflection in the mirror, a semi-unfamiliar face staring back at her. The girl in the mirror has dark, lank hair matted with grease; dirt and sweat smeared across her face; and hollow, sunken eyes. It's been a while since she's looked in the mirror—she's not had the need for one for years. Alex tears her gaze away from her reflection and tugs open the drawers next to the sink. The top ones open to reveal extra towels and an assortment of hair brushes and beauty products. The bottom ones won't open, no matter how much she tugs. She pulls so hard that when her slick fingers loose traction on the edges, she falls backward in a heap, narrowly missing smacking the back of her head on the corner of the bath tub. There's nothing here for her, no means of escape, no pills.

Alex staggers to her feet, making it back to her cot before nausea overtakes her. She's got nothing to puke up, but the smell of the woman's breakfast mush cramps her stomach. She sits there with her hands choking to death the metal railings of her cot, knuckles white as she stares intently at the patterns in the floor as if she believes she can set it aflame with her eyes. But no. The last thing she wants is fire.

She has no measurement of time in this large apartment, but she guesses it's about an hour before the woman returns with a jingle of keys in the lock and what Alex thinks is supposed to be a companionable smile. "Hey," her captor says, walking into the room with bags dangling from her arms. "How're you feeling? Did you eat yet?" She glances down at the plastic bowl untouched by Alex's feet. "That's cool; I like it cold. Cold and spicy." She sets the bags on the counter, still speaking in that same friendly tone that Alex hates. "So, as promised, I got you a few things. I know it's not Prada, but cute, right?" She holds up a pink shirt with buttons in the front for Alex's inspection. Alex bypasses the shirt entirely and fixes her angry gaze on the woman's face. "Come on," says the older woman. "The first step to feeling good is looking good. And I want my clothes back." She walks back towards the bags, heels clicking against the floor.

"What are you gonna do to me?" Alex asks, staring straight ahead. "You don't know me. You don't know anything about me. So what do you want?"

"I know you like _smack_," the woman says, and Alex flinches slightly at the word. Her captor sits down on the other side of the bed. "For me it was ketamine. K all the way. What am I going to do to you?" She pauses, and Alex can feel her gaze boring in the back of her skull, but she refuses to turn around. "I'm going to do what I wish somebody had done for me."

"You got me here, trapped," Alex says. "So why are you lying?"

"When I was high, I did something," the woman tells her. "Something I went to prison for, something I'm going to be paying for the rest of my life. When I saw you, I saw a chance to prevent it from happening again."

"Where?" Alex demands.

"Where what?"

"_Where_ _did you see me_?"

Her captor sighs. "I saw you walk into that crackhouse."

"Why were you there? Someone like you doesn't just walk by a place like that! Were you following me?"

"No," she says calmly, but Alex won't stop for breath. She has questions she needs answers to, questions that will force her captor to reveal this place for what it is. Hell.

"How do you know my name?"

"I heard your dealer say it."

"What's your name?"

The woman looks at her before standing up from the bed. "It's not a trap. When you're back to full health, you're free to go. Forget you ever met me." She picks up the bags and places the shirt down on the bed before walking out of the room. Alex pushes the offending article of clothing away, glaring once more at the floor. With sobriety comes a lucidity of thought that she hates. She hates a lot of things. This woman. This apartment. The sauna. Being trapped, ever and at all.

But the drugs. She doesn't hate the drugs. The drugs were her savior once, what kept her sane through countless tortures she can't bear to think about, and without them, she's forced to. She's forced to live things that shouldn't have to have been lived once, much less relived. This woman doesn't know anything about her. She doesn't understand anything.

Alex is not someone who needs saving from her way of life. She's not someone who accidentally got hooked and became an addict. After she escaped the sex slave cages, drugs weren't a choice. They were a necessity. And she doesn't want to get off the stuff that deadens her to the world because the world is harsh and cruel and dark and she doesn't want to be a part of it. Based on her eighteen years of experience, life doesn't like her much either.

The woman returns a few minutes later with her laptop and a notepad. She positions herself at the desk so that Alex can't see what she's doing, beginning to type. "You can keep talking, if you'd like," her captor says without looking up. "It's been a while since I've had anyone over here. It's always very quiet."

"So I'm the first one you've kidnapped in a while," Alex spits. "That's reassuring."

"This isn't a kidnapping. It's for your own good, although I get that it may not seem like it right now."

"You don't get anything." Alex crosses her arms and refuses to say any more. Her captor continues her work for a while more, glancing at her over the screen of her laptop every few minutes. Finally she gets up and opens a drawer, taking out a couple books and a hunk of plastic about the size of two fists.

"Well, if you don't feel like talking to me, maybe you can use these to help take your mind off of the drugs," the woman says, placing the books on the bed.

"I don't want to read."

"Some music, then?" Alex is suddenly attentive and identifies the black plastic as a radio. "I think FM 98.7 plays some good stuff around this time of day." Her hands close of their own accord around the radio, fingers fumbling for the on switch. Static emanates from it before she figures out the rest of the controls, including the ones that control the channel frequency. She twists the knob and suddenly a soft drum beat comes out, accompanied by more instruments she can't identify and a woman's voice. Alex sets the device back down on the bed, listening hard. She can feel her captor watching her curiously, but she doesn't care. She spends hours lost in the music. It reminds her of other times hidden under a bed in secret, of home and love and laughter and campfires. It's late in the afternoon—well past lunch, another meal she refused to eat—when Alex reaches over and impulsively shots the radio off, unable to listen any more. Her head is pounding from the constant sound, irrevocably forcing her to remember where she really is, and who.

"Why'd you stop it?" the woman asks. "You looked like you were enjoying it."

Alex gives her an angry glance, angry that she let the woman see she was enjoying any part of being here. Music doesn't stop her from hating this place, and it certainly doesn't stop it from being hell. "I have a headache," she growls truthfully.

Her caption rises from her chair. "Let me get you something for that," she says. The woman walks into the next room and there's a jingle of keys again, and then a sound that Alex is already very familiar with: the sound of a bottle of pills. "It's not a narcotic—I don't keep any of those around for obvious reasons," the woman says as she returns, "—but it might help take the edge off. Do you need water?"

In answer, Alex snatches the little white pill out of her hand and downs it, feeling the little lump slide down her throat and ignoring the slight need to gag it induces.

Later on in the day her captor fixes them both dinner, and Alex eats it grudgingly, finding herself all of a sudden exceedingly hungry. Still, she doesn't consume much at all, and the woman seems concerned with Alex's appetite though she says nothing in reference to it. When her captor suggests she take a shower, Alex acquiesces, but steps under the spray still fully clothed. Outside the tub, she changes quickly into dry clothes, leaving her soiled ones in a pile on the floor.

That night, when all the lights are turned out save a small beacon in the bathroom, she curls into a ball on her bed, facing away from her captor. The woman appears well aware of Alex's insomnia, as she's sitting up in bed reading something in the glow of her tablet. Maybe she thinks Alex will slit her throat or bash her head in during the night if she falls asleep first. Alex doesn't mind the idea that her sleeplessness is keeping her captor awake; after all, it's her fault she's here in the first place.

When she finally does fall asleep, her dreams are fraught with nightmares from her subconscious. She finds herself back at home, home with its warm vanilla walls and delicate embroidery and curved staircase perfect for sliding down. But it's not home as she wants to see it—gunshots crackle through the air; she's backing away from the sound. All of a sudden her father is there, normally proud and strong, but now with a wild panic that scares her more than anything else.

He grabs her arm, running them through the house and up that staircase. She's asking him questions, what's happening, who's out there, but he won't answer, only pushes her onward. He ushers her through a door and then she's back in her childhood room. "Nye!" she exclaims as her father closes the door behind them, shielding her with his body as he orders her under the bed. Under the bed, where she spent countless blissful hours with her illicit MP3 player. "Nyet!" Somehow she knows what happens next in the dream, what always happens next. "Papa! Nyet!"

The door bangs open and the boots appear. The shot goes off and Alex screams, her father dropping to the floor with a river of scarlet flowing freely out of his chest. She's screaming bloody murder, which is it is, thrashing about under the bed trying to get away. Then the dream changes, deviates from what's supposed to happen. Her father's not on the floor anymore, and she's on top of the bed, tucked in, not underneath it. Her mother sits on the edge of it, stroking Alexandra's hair like she used to when she was little and had a bad dream. "Shh," her mother tells her softly. "Shh. You're safe now." She gives her daughter a gentle smile. "You're safe."

* * *

"How're you feeling?" the woman asks as Alex sits in her customary hunched position the next morning.

"Like I need a hit," she replies back, but it's lost the venom it had the previous day. She can't muster the hate when the world is so desolate, when her mother had been ripped away from her yet again upon waking. With a mind clearer than it's been in years, Alex has to face the fact that dreams are the only ways she'll see her parents again. It's oddly fitting, in a cruel, twisted way, that the only home the junkie's ever known can only be visited in her dreams.

"I'm going out again," her captor tells her. "Grocery shopping. There's a little place just around the corner that makes the best fresh baguettes outside of France. I won't be gone long, okay?" If she's expecting a reply she gets none. Alex is too torn up inside, too ravaged to care much about what her tormentor is doing.

It's only after she leaves that another thought, clearer than the ones before, occurs to her. The pills. When the woman had gotten one for her yesterday, she'd heard keys and what sounded like the opening of a cabinet in the next room over. Alex stands with new purpose, oblivious to how she's steadier on her feet today and only caring about finding that cabinet and getting at its contents.

She hurries into the next room, casting her eyes around for anything that could have made that sound. As for cabinets, there's only one, and she reaches up to tug on the doors though she knows they won't open. The locking mechanism isn't very good, however, and she can jiggle the door quite a lot, though not quite enough to slip her hand through and definitely not wide enough to get anything akin to a bottle out. Sweaty palmed with a pounding heart, Alex scrabbles, scrapes, claws at the door like a wild animal before forcing herself to take a step back and really think about it.

She can't pick a lock with a bent paper clip, but she can bash it open with a frying pan. And she does, swinging it wildly and without much aim and almost dropping it several times before she finally gets the cabinet open, revealing bottles of various pills. She sends them all tumbling down to the floor with an uncoordinated sweep of her hand and drops to the ground to meet them, feverishly examining the labels of each.

It's not enough to get high again. This she knows; she knows because her captor will be back. Alex has no desire to return to the 'sauna,' and she knows without a doubt that is where she'll end up. No, she needs a more permanent solution to her pain, one that ends her torment once and for all, one that pulls her out of this hell. She can't stand it anymore, the aches of her body, the demons of her mind. It's all too much and she wasn't built for it and she can't handle it and she just wants _out_.

She reaches and snatches up a bottle of sleeping pills, lurching back into the other room with them. The first has absolutely no effect as she sits on the edge of her bed, swallowing hard and gulping air. Neither does the second, nor the third. By the fourth the room is swimming a little, but she keeps going. Five, six, seven, eight. She's not sure when exactly she ended up on the floor with the little bottle clutched in her hand. Her clumsy movements cause it to go skittering across the floor, spreading the pills just out of reach. She reaches for the bottle but it's empty now, and her limbs are attached to her like lead weights. Her blinks come slowly as she gazes with a detached air at the pearly white pills scattered across a small swath of floor. Like the dew on the blades of grass in the morning, or the lightest dusting of snow on the roof. Then she's no longer lying on cold stone but on soft sand, hearing the waves crash onto the the beach. Then, she's nowhere at all.

* * *

"Alex?" The world comes screaming back to her in the taste of bitter water sliding down her throat and the sudden convulsions of her stomach. She heaves, acid mixed with half-dissolved medicine splashing and spattering onto the floor. Her lungs burn with fire and she coughs uncontrollably on all fours. "Hey," the woman says, placing a hand on her shoulder, but she brushes her off, chest muscles still spasming. "Are you okay? Just breathe." When she feels the foreign hand on her again she starts to scream.

"No! Let me go!" she shrieks, scrambling away. There are tear tracks on her cheeks, blurring her vision though she doesn't remember crying. "Let me go!"

"Stop," the woman tells her forcefully amid her screams. "No."

"No, let me go!" The woman's pinning her down now. "Let me—"

"Go where?" the woman asks.

"Just let me die!" She fights as much as she can, rocks back and forth, but the woman's grip is iron. Finally she stops fighting her, curling into a ball as waves of anguish roll over her. Fresh tears well in her eyes and her heart feels like it might split with the pain of it all as she begins to sob.

"I can't," the woman tells her softly.

"I have nothing to live for. Nothing," Alex bursts out, long-kept secrets leaking out with her tears onto the stone floor. "They're all dead." She gulps, the agony of it immense and all-consuming. "Everyone I love is dead."

Her captor gives her a pained look, sitting back and leaving a foot or so of space between them. This is the first time the woman has seemed anything but collected and in control since Alex has known her. "I know." Alex frowns, her sobs slowing for a minute as she processes the woman's words. "I was following you, Alex," her captor confesses. Her head lifts off the floor at this, confirmation of all her suspicions, a new revelation that this cryptic woman is now freely giving. "I've been searching for you for over two years." She leans almost imperceptibly closer. "I know how you got here. Where you came from." Somehow Alex believes what she's saying, at last, the truth.

"I know who killed your parents," the woman says with finality. "Trust me. You have something to live for." She offers her her hand and Alex grasps her forearm to pull herself to her feet, gaze boring into the woman.

"How do you know?" she croaks, and then, louder and more forcefully, "Who are you?"

"Who I am isn't important," the woman says, now avoiding her gaze.

"I say it is. What's your name?"

The woman looks down. "I can explain, but it requires a field trip and isn't going to be easy for you to hear. I'm not sure you're ready."

Alex meets her gaze levelly for the first time, without malice or desperation or any of the other hateful things that have driven her since the woman took her in. "I am."

* * *

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